‘Value engineering’ going to lead to urban squalor?

The Guardian is carrying a story “A disdain for urban planning is the problem, not overcrowding: Lack of planning has given us urban squalor, where, with a bit of regulation, dense populations could live in comfort“. The basic thrust is that developer-led planning and so-called ‘value engineering’ – the desire to cram in as many apartments into a space as possible, with poorly designed social infrastructure and general lack of amenities, has led to high urban densities, poor aestethics, weak senses of community and social problems. It concludes:

“Rather than being held to strict standards, developers were given carte blanche; instead of council housing easing the overcrowding of the poor, a percentage of allegedly affordable housing was sold in each block of terracotta-clad yuppiedromes. Meanness – “value engineering” as it is euphemistically known – was what made the New Labour landscape so grim, not height, planning or modernity, and certainly not overcrowding.”

Value engineering has certainly been at play in Ireland, especially given the need to cram as many units onto sites as possible to turn a sizable profit given the astromonical land costs. The question is, are the apartment complexes here going to deteriorate into grim, urban squalor as this article suggests?

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9 Responses to “‘Value engineering’ going to lead to urban squalor?”

“The question is, are the apartment complexes here going to deteriorate into grim, urban squalor as this article suggests?”

If you are brave enough…. a walk about Ballymun will provide the simple answer.

However in fairness it is the occupants themselves who destroy or squalorize social housing which for the most part … even in spite of ‘value engineering’ is of modern build standard.

Perhaps a key question here is why do the occupants of social housing feel a limited sense of possession, ownership or pride in the social housing they have been provided with? Is there something in the class structure of our social system which encourages the resentment of social housing by the occupants because of a brutal relativity in social class that is reinforced by the charitable act of housing the poor. In housing the poor do we somehow reinforce their own resentment of their relative poverty… and subsequent resentment of their housing.

Clearly as any bus shelter in Ballymun will attest to there is little pride in the housing that is provided socially. The value engineering of the housing might reinforce the occupants perceptions of themselves as battery hens… and might render the destruction of the property easier through using cheaper door handles that are more easily pulled off etc However is it not the relative nature of wealth distribution which makes people feel their housing is inadequate? Vis not that their social housing is so poor or value engineered that it is not deserving of respect… but rather the relative nature of social housing compared to the ‘mansions’ of others.

There is a relativity in our society where social housing is not poorly constructed but has a relative poverty that is psychologically perceived.

It is the driver of the mercedes who informs other drivers on the roads that their cars are relatively inferior… Equally in a social context is it not possible that the profligacy and wealth of the middle and upperclasses play a role in reminding those in social housing that they ‘only’ live in social housing… and their lack of respect for their social housing is an enevitable consequence.

Therefore is it relativity rather than value engineering that results in the squalorizing… of social housing?

My sense is that the Guardian article is not about social housing, but apartment complexes in general, and in particular high density, private developments. It is these that have been developer-led and driven by value engineering (not social housing schemes). The question is whether these complexes will deteriorate into grim, urban squalor.

It would not suprize if they also turned against cut-price dog boxes too.

Meanwhile, the ideal that every other major city adopts, of vertical development, parks and pubic transport still does not offer enough profit for politicians to force developers to try it in Dublin, too. I do not believe that any other city needs that solution, except perhaps Belfast.

I was once pilloried for having suggested that we were building the slums of the future but nevertheless, I wondered how long it would take for the tide of fashion to turn against the recent popularity of design guidelines that promoted “high-density, low-rise” and social class integration as an urban planning panacea. Not long it seems if the Guardian article is anything to go by.

Peter Hall in his book “Cities of Tomorrow” concluded dismally;

“Social progress which is no myth – has left behind, as stubbornly evident as ever, a problem of what the Victorians and their American equivalents called the vicious and degenerate and semi-criminal classes, and which the more enlightened (or mealy-mouthed) late twentieth century calls the disadvantaged and the underprivileged. Planning, and the whole twentieth-century apparatus of the welfare state, has failed to dislodge it, or even satisfactorily to explain it; as then, so now, some blame the system, others Original Sin.”

Regenerating urban areas has been quite successful in commercial terms but has been a good deal less than successful in terms of making provision for housing. Housing it seems is more subject to the vagaries of “fashionable” intellectual ideas.

But then you should remember that in the early twentieth century planners justified the breeding of rats for garbage disposal and proposed densities of “eight-to-the-acre” to minimize damage from aerial bombardment. They are nothing if not fashion-conscious.

Today we believe that Residential Design based on theories of “Socio-Architecture” will enable us to address social problems.

When you hear planners and architects talk about the scientific approach to housing estate design, the most important thing to keep in your mind is that the whole science of “socio-architecture” was invented by an architect and a psychiatrist tripping on LSD in a lunatic asylum on the Canadian prairies.

As long as you keep that knowledge foremost in your mind you can maintain a proper perspective on the scientific worth of Planning and Architectural theories and the conclusion that high-density living is good for all of us.

Aparently the universal problem with urban planning is that it is conducted by urbane urbanites who try to factor everything into the plans…. other than the intellectual capacity of the residents… and the rate at which entropy asserts ultimate authority over her dominion

I suppose it depends on whether your professor was an Architect or a Sociologist. This is a summary from Wikipedia. (I especially like the bit about the wallpaper.)

“The popular conception of the Bauhaus as the source of extensive Weimar-era working housing is not accurate. Two projects, the apartment building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing also in Dessau, fall in that category, but developing worker housing was not the first priority of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. In Taut’s case, the housing he built in south-west Berlin during the 1920s, is still occupied, and can be reached by going easily from the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte … The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building, the school did not offer classes in architecture until 1927. The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.”